Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda

Independent researcher

Mediatized hate speech fuelled the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda nearly three decades ago, yet anti-Tutsi rhetoric is still circulating in the Great Lakes region, albeit under a radically changed media and political landscape. Social media and online platforms facilitate the proliferation of inflammatory and discriminatory discourses whose...

The Democratic Republic of Congo has experienced patterns of mass victimization since the country’s inception. As a private domain of King Leopold ii of Belgium, a Belgian colony or an independent state; the country has undergone numerous episodes of violence affecting not only individuals but also entire communities. Socio-political and economic c...

The evolving jurisprudence of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights displays ambiguities in interpretations of the peoples' rights provisions of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. The article comparatively examines the Endorois and Southern Cameroon decisions adopted in 2009 in an effort to uncover the challenges faced...

The book focuses on three very important themes that are central to contemporary debates on justice for victims: (1) victim rights, (2) transitional justice and (3) trauma, resilience and justice. Victim rights have developed over the years, but the book raises question on whether these are indeed rights or mere standards. Transitional justice addr...

Jean-Pierre Bemba is on trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) based on the legal theory of command responsibility for crimes allegedly committed by Congolese soldiers deployed in the Central African Republic (CAR) at the request of the country’s President Ange-Félix Patassé during the 2002–2003 conflict. Various ICC actors, including...

The present article discursively explores the contentiousness of indigenous identification and claims in Africa. In recent decades, a growing number of mainly hunter-gatherer and pastoralist communities have adopted a new form of identification as the indigenous peoples of Africa. Claimant communities have liaised with groups from other parts of th...

The legal and institutional framework for protection of individuals and groups in Africa—as elsewhere—has undergone numerous changes in both principle and practice. The said-changes were products of a dynamic history, a readjustment of philosophical precepts or geopolitical dictates. Some of the said-changes might have been local in nature, but mos...

The Maasai—along the likes of the Zulus—constitute, arguably, few of the globally recognizable ‘ethnicities’ in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the popular minds and representations, they represent a people ‘[u]ncowed by their neighbours, colonial conquest, or modernization’, who ‘stand in proud mute testimony to a vanishing African world’. It has rightly b...

Since, the December 2006 ruling by the High Court of Botswana in Roy Sesana v. Attorney General, there are contrasted views as to whether the overall process was beneficial for the 242 claimants, for the Basarwa or for Botswana as a country. From one perspective, the case was a real success: powerless members of a marginal community won a high prof...

The preceding chapters have discursively explored the relatively recent identification of numerous hunter-gatherers and pastoralists as indigenous peoples of Africa under the meaning attributable to this international legal category. The present chapter intends to explore whether and how African political and legal regional bodies accommodate indig...

The previous developments suggested, based on available documentation, that claimant indigenous groups in Africa first gained international recognition before using it as a token in their battle for domestic recognition. International recognition of specific groups as constitutive of indigenous peoples in Africa results from a coalescence of normat...

In a judgment rendered on 13 December 2006 by the High Court of Botswana, Roy Sesana was described as a ‘member of the Kgei band of the San or Basarwa people’, whose ancestors ‘are indigenous to the Central Kgalagadi region’. A San rights activist and early member of the First People of the Kalahari (FPK), Roy Sesana acquired international fame sin...

For the past several centuries, Rwanda has been inhabited by three groups which have successively been referred to as races, classes, tribes or, ethnicities. Colonial encounter towards the end of the nineteenth century marvelled at what they saw as a sophisticated level of centralization of a Rwandan kingdom inhabited by three very different people...

The last two decades of the twentieth century have seen the expansion of indigenous claims worldwide. Numerous groups presented as being in the margins of societies in which they live, with political, social, economic or cultural ways of life differing from the ‘mainstream’ society, have come to identify with a movement that initiated in the Americ...

In the previous analysis, indigenousness was discussed in more general terms, the emphasis being put on historical evolution of the concept and related claims. The rise of indigenous identity was further reflected upon against the background of, and in contrast with, other related notions advocating societal pluralism or multiculturalism. The reson...

Following the internationalisation of the indigenous rights movement, a growing number of African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and other communities have adopted indigenousness in claiming special legal protection. Their legal claims as the indigenous peoples of Africa are backed by many international actors such as indigenous rights activists, d...

Recent evolutions in international (human rights) law standards-setting have focused on promotion and protection of rights of indigenous peoples as collectives. The latter are presented as victims of existing and imposed institutional and legal structures in current Westphalian-modelled polities. 'Victim' in this context remains a concept to be cla...

Rachel Murray, Human Rights in Africa: From the OAU to the African Union, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN-13: 9780521839174, ISBN-10: 0521839173, 349 pp., £50.00 (hb). M. Mubiala, Le Système régional Africain de Protection des Droits de l'Homme, Brussels, Bruylant, 2005, ISBN 280272021X, 299 pp., €65.00.

The present study is dedicated to a discussion on the efficiency of exercise of ICC jurisdiction, based on past international criminal law experience. While acknowledging the unprecedented significance of the establishment of a permanent international criminal court, it focuses on the numerous perceived shortcomings in the ICC statute system, likel...